Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Our organization is 25 years old, and here is its mission.
The first component of the mission is support for people who are at the end of their life at the Hôtel-Dieu-de-Saint-Hyacinthe palliative care unit and at home.
Our second component is support for individuals who are bereaved. That is what brings me here today.
We train volunteers who support those people. They were initially selected because they have strong listening skills and an unwavering respect for human beings' ability to take care of themselves. We support individuals who are going through difficult times. We have to ensure that our volunteers do that as tactfully as necessary. Our support is completely free of charge, and I want to stress that: we support people for free. Currently, we have 60 volunteers on our staff.
Our basic training, titled “supporting others is supporting yourself”, is a 30-hour course. After that training, we select the individuals who become our volunteers. It should be noted that not all individuals who attend that training can become volunteers. Afterwards, before they start to provide any support, our new volunteers receive 15 hours of training on helping relationships, titled “the support worker”. Following that second training course, volunteers decide whether they want to support people at the end of their life or people who are bereaved.
The new volunteer can immediately be used as a co-facilitator in a group of bereaved adults. We do not let our new volunteers provide support alone. We show them the proper way to do it. This means that bereaved people are provided with individual support or participate in groups of five to eight people. We are talking about 10 meetings over 10 weeks. Two volunteers provide support in groups, and one volunteer provides support to someone else during individual meetings. So the support provided over those 10 weeks is done right.
The following training courses are added to the basic training. A special approach has been developed for supporting children who are bereaved. It is called “I listen to my little voice”. That is a 15-hour training course. Volunteers who have received that training can support groups of bereaved children. We also have a special approach for adolescents called “discovering your road”. That is another 15-hour training course that enables people who take it to support adolescents.
We have also started to develop an approach to deal with infant loss. Many people in our society often do not consider the loss of an unborn or newly born child as true bereavement. However, the parents, grandparents and other family members are very affected by that loss. So we will provide special training that will enable its attendees to support the clientele affected by a loss that is just as important.
As for family members who have lost a child, we support them through various approaches we have developed. Every bereavement is unique, and we listen to the specific needs of every person who turns to us.
Taking into account the available budget, we register our volunteers for different conferences and training sessions. A number of volunteers have received the training Agir en sentinelle pour la prévention du suicide—acting as sentinels to prevent suicide.
On Friday, November 2, which is tomorrow, a seminar we organized will be held at the Saint-Hyacinthe Convention Centre. Its title is “loss and family”. A number of our volunteers will be in attendance. About 100 people will be there to hear conferences on various topics related to that theme.
Our organization has built an excellent reputation over its 25 years of existence. Bereaved individuals who have used our support have all talked about the improved well-being they experienced afterwards. The meetings give them an opportunity to talk freely about the great void left by the deceased individual. They were able to recognize the emotions they were experiencing and left with tools that would help them in the future. So returning to normal life became easy.
I would like to talk to you about our financial situation.
We receive funding from the Government of Quebec through the community organizations support program, but that money is insufficient. It accounts for only 40% of our annual budget.
Fortunately, we have generous donors who support us financially every year. Despite that, we have to hold two fundraising dinners. When things go well, the money raised by those dinners helps us balance our budget. However, year after year, we are seeing a drop in people's enthusiasm for those types of activities.
Be that as it may, we put many hours into the preparation of those events. The time we are putting into that gives us less time for developing our approaches, supporting our volunteers or strengthening our cooperation with the health centre and our various partners.
Thank you for listening to me. I hope you will take our testimony into account.